Constitution Party of Idaho: Kicking the high hat…

With the aftermath of the decision (52%) by British voters to leave the European Union, talking heads are providing a veritable kaldtbord of sentiment as to its net outcome. CP-Idaho may as well join our brethren in the hallingkast and offer our own interpretative spins and kicks.

Kaldtbord, we note, is the Norwegian equivalent of smorgasbord, a more familiar culinary term made popular by their Swedish neighbors to the east. And hallingkast?…that is a Norwegian folk dance with a high hat for a target.

As for hats, we tip ours to The Week, a British publication, which said of the “Brexit” vote…“The trouble is that most of us have no clue as to how the Brussels monolith works, or who’s in charge. Too many of us can’t be bothered to vote in European elections.”

If there was ever a commonality between politics in the EU and politics in the USA, it would be this. CP-Idaho has said more times than we care to count; when you sleep upon your rights you awake without them. Britain apparently awoke; and began its search for them.

Europe of course is not the United States, try as globalists like Barrack Hussein Obama might. Europe, relatively speaking, is convoluted. Not for nothing, George Washington warned our nascent nation off foreign entanglements there.

As for the “monolith” mentioned, frankly, we do not see it. The European Union is far less than that, despite efforts of globalists in Brussels as well. Indeed, the EU has never been such. Its convolutions are as many as the languages commonly spoken there.

Doubts, for example, exist on the question of whether EU “law” is superior to individual national law. True, Court of Justice judgments have certainly sought to establish EU judicial supremacy; but again, not all nation members agree. France and Italy, so-called EU “core member nations,” accept the notion. But Poland does not. Poland holds her own national constitution as superior, despite perpetual ratcheting efforts over the years to impose Brussels upon all.

The Week cited center-left political Labour Party MP (Member of Parliament) Kate Hoey. EU is “an attempt to replace the democratic power of the people with a permanent administration in the interests of big business.” EU intrusions have drained power from British Parliament…and, we add, from British Courts.

In December 2007, with the signing of the Lisbon Treaty (styled as the Reform Treaty), amendments were made to two treaties which provided the constitutional basis of the EU—namely the Treaty of Rome (1957) and the Maastricht Treaty (1993). Ever and always, EU “reform” leads to ever more consolidation—or “replacement” as Labour MP Hoey put it.

The Lisbon treaty, by degrees, had as its aim a judicial hegemony via the Court of Justice of the European Union. Ultimately, member nations balked, and the Lisbon treaty fell short of its grand ambition. Jurisdiction of the courts continue to be excluded from matters of foreign policy by member nations…to the dismay of globalists everywhere.

The irony is that the Lisbon Treaty may prove to be EU’s own undoing…it “gave” for the first time the explicit legal right of any member state to leave the EU, and provided a procedure to do so. Thus, should dissolution of the EU occur, it cannot be laid at the feet of the British electorate. Rather, dissolution lies in the EU premise itself…pick ‘n mix.

Which brings us back to Norway, a non-EU nation. Norway’s voters have the distinction of twice rejecting a referendum to enter the EU—in 1972 and again in 1994. Full court pressure to join was evident, to be sure. Norway’s former European Free Trade Association partners—fellow Nordic Council nations Finland and Sweden plus Austria—did join. This reduced the EFTA to Iceland, Norway, Lichtenstein and Switzerland. Swiss voters have also rejected the EU.

Then, there’s the Central European Free Trade Agreement (principally Balkan countries), and the Organization of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation, and also Russia’s entry called the Union State—all which is to say overlapping treaty and trade structures exist in Europe. It’s a veritable Venn diagram for a plate of organizational spaghetti.

British voters are now, predictably, pilloried for cutting continental ties. But in truth, those ties were never tightly bound because of an “opt-out”–particularly from the Economic and Monetary Union which sought to force the euro as the sole legal currency. Britain obtained the right to retain her own independent currency (otherwise Britain would not have joined); but so too did Denmark.

Other opt-out differences exist. The UK and Ireland did not participate in the Schengen Agreement to eliminate internal EU border checks—to the dismay of jihadists everywhere. As for Denmark, Danes have been protective of their national state interest by not only keeping the krone, but also opting out of EU’s Common Security and Defense Policy as well as EU police and justice matters (in 2015).

Our point is that the European Union has not been as “monolithic” as portrayed. The sky did not fall when Norway’s voters twice rejected overtures from the EU, nor did it when Switzerland did the same. Economic calamity did not ensue when Denmark kept the krone, or when Britain retained the pound—this despite the breathless present frantic calls by opposition (e.g. Labour MP David Lammy) to overturn what he styles as “madness”–the vote of the people to exit the ill-conceived venture of a Brussels bureaucracy on automatic pilot.

The Norwegians kicked the high hat; the Swiss blew their alpenhorn; the Brits took the Brexit. Life goes on…whether the Brussels bureaucrats must take a trim or not. As for prognostications, alas, poor Yorick, Denmark may now be next to reject EU’s bureaucratic “perpetual ratchet”. Or racket, as the case may be.